BookshelfMonstrosity: The search for someone missing, a girl friend (Reality Check) and an ideal girl (Paper Towns) becomes a voyage of self-discovery for high school boys in different mysteries, one dialogue-rich and character-driven, the other plot-driven and suspenseful.… (more)

Paper towns is an amazing book that is both ridiculously engrossing and extremely fascinating. The reason I loved the book so much was mainly because of how relatable it is, and I think a lot of people can get on board with that statement. The characters display typical high school students, and their problems can be conveyed as struggles that teens in real life deal with everyday. The book's plot is both hilarious and super witty, which makes it really easy to read and super hard to put down. Overall, the book is a super cute and interesting story that will leave you asking for more when you finish. ( )

` Another awesome novel by John Green. Quentin has had a crush on his neighbor Margo. They were friends when they were younger, but as they got older they grew apart. They hadn't talked for a while until one night when Margot sneaked into Quentin's room and takes him on an all-night adventure in which she practically forces him to be a dare-devil. The next day she is gone. The rest of the novel is a mystery, and Quentin is determined to solve it! I really enjoyed the story line. So much so, that I watched the movie as well! I felt as though I knew the characters, and I loved it! Definitely read this book if you are into mysteries/love stories/teenage novels!!!!!! ( )

Where did Margo go? That's what Quentin is trying to solve. He thinks that if he finds the suburbs that were only planned, never built he might locate the girl of his dreams. But who is Margo really? ( )

This is the second book I’ve read by John Green. I was a little apprehensive and wary going into this one because the fact is, it is a John Green novel. But this book has turned into one of my favorite reads this year and also my top favorite book by him. I was sucked in from the beginning. John Green has an amazing talent. He can write the most beautiful stories, with real and believable characters. Lets start by saying that Margo Roth Spiegelman is a unique character, she reminded me of myself in a way. She captured a very special part in my heart. She was so charming and witty, so much so that I wanted her to be real. I wanted to be her friend. John Green made me love this character in a few chapters only to have her disappear. And here comes the plot. Quentin Jacobsen, is adorable and awkward. He has his own kind of charm but he is one of those characters that never really do anything until somebody changes their life. When Margo disappears he starts searching for the clues she left. And so begins the journey to find Margo. Like Quentin, I was afraid of what I might find at the end of the road. I felt like I was also trying through understand Margo through her clues just like Q. I felt myself get lost and found again all through out the wonderful journey that was this book. The plot was so unique. It wasn’t just finding Margo through a series of clues. It was much more than a mystery book. It was about understanding and acceptance. The characters were amazing. I felt connected to all of them. Quentin’s friends were fun and hilarious. My favorite part was the road trip. Because despite it being full of uncertainty at what they might find at the end of the line. It was also full of good times with friends. The ending isn’t a happy one but it is very satisfying. And in my opinion very appropriate.

John Green wrote the most captivating and moving novel I’ve read in quite a while. I will certainly carry this one with me for a long time. I wished I would have read it going through high school; it would have helped me a lot. This book had everything, breathtaking quotes, a strong mystery, funny moments and unforgettable characters. ( )

And after, when we went outside to look at her finished lantern from the road, I said I liked the way her light shone through the face that flickered in the dark. -"Jack O'Lantern," Katrina Vandenberg in Atlas

People say friends don't destroy one another What do they know about friends? -"Game shows Touch Our Lives," The Mountain Goats

Dedication

To Julie Strauss- Gabel, without whom none of this could have become real.

First words

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.

Quotations

Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, thoses streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.

Margo was not a miracle. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

I like finding stuff out about her. I mean, that I didn't know before. I had no idea who she really was. I honestly never thought of her as anything but my crazy beautiful friend who does all the crazy beautiful things.

What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.

Ben looks at me, his mouth on the edge of smiling, and the says, "I mean, that was a big damned cow. It wasn't even a cow so much as it was a land whale.

Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.

But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.

Chuck Parson was a person. Like me. Margo Roth Spiegelman was a person, too. And I had never quite thought of her that way, not really; it was a failure of all my previous imaginings. All along - no only since she left, but for a decade before - I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as poor a window as I did.

The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of the sentence.

There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.

The only wounded man I can be is me.

I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.

We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.

And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them.

Wikipedia in English (3)

Two-time Printz Medalist John Green’s New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award nominee, now in paperback!

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his lifedressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge he follows. After their all-nighter ends, and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew.

One month before graduating from his Central Florida high school, Quentin "Q" Jacobsen basks in the predictable boringness of his life until the beautiful and exciting Margo Roth Spiegelman, Q's neighbor and classmate, takes him on a midnight adventure and then mysteriously disappears.… (more)